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This beautifully written account details an intimate portrait of the intellectual friendship between two commanding figures of Western letters and the early enviromental movement - Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto.
This beautifully written account details an intimate portrait of the intellectual friendship between two commanding figures of Western letters and the early enviromental movement - Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto. The authors of enormously popular works - Stegner most well known for his novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain and DeVoto for his classic history of western exploration, The Course of Empire - they also played important roles in the efforts to stop government and private interests from carving up the vanishing West.
Through vivid and searching portraits of these three redoubtable
journalists, prizewinning historian John L. Thomas traces for the
first time the evolving ideologies of the most significant
reformers of their age.
George's "Progress and Poverty," Bellamy's "Looking Backward,"
and Lloyd's "Wealth against Commonwealth" each in its turn became
an international best-seller, championing a course of national
policy and social reform that owed allegiance neither to the
large-scale capitalist model then emerging, nor to the bureaucratic
socialism espoused on the left. Also common to the vast writings of
all three were a deep distrust of partisan machine politics and a
mounting sense of social crisis which neither spoilsmanship nor
materialism seemed able to address.
Seeking instead diversity and cooperation within society, small
economic units, and simplicity in government, the authors of these
works were moved to defend strikes during the heyday of industrial
capitalism. They spoke out for international peace when imperialism
was rampant. They called for the preservation of community values
in the face of urban sprawl. And they urged the goals of
brotherhood and interdependence in an age when survival of the
fittest was seen as holy writ.
They failed magnificently as apostles of a radical culture
based on the ideal of a community, yet their intellectual legacy
was not lost: their heirs include the broad movement that took the
name Progressive, the New Deal, and the hopeful crusades of the
1960s. This magnificent book is their memorial and their
history.
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